What did Peter and Bobby Farrelly do after a decade plus of awful filmmaking on their slow slide toward irrelevance? They directed a long-gestating, totally unnecessary sequel to their first film, Dumb and Dumber. I hate to rag on the Farrelly Brothers, but they have shown nothing close to a filmmaking spark since Fever Pitch a decade ago. Dumb and Dumb...Read the entire review

The shiny, neon-colored vistas of San Fransokyo give Big Hero 6 an immediate visual appeal that is quickly matched by a strong story and exciting action. This Disney Animation Studios production is gorgeously realized, and each character and location is treated to sparkling, lifelike detail. The hero of this story is Hiro Hamada, a 14-year-old wunderkind who fights his own robotic creations in underground, cash-stakes matches. The real star is Baymax, a giant, marshmallow-like health care rob...Read the entire review

I guess 2013's V/H/S 2 represents the peak on this cinematic bell curve, as the original and this second sequel, V/H/S: Viral, are about on par with one another. This outing again bundles several short films that tangentially fit amid a larger, wrap-around story. I guess this film is making some point about our society's overreliance on social media and viral video, but this is not particularly clear. V/H/S: Viral retai...Read the entire review

Steve James crafts another powerful, warts-and-all documentary, this time about longtime Chicago movie critic Roger Ebert. The Hoop Dreams director pulls from Ebert's own memoir, and, fittingly, Martin Scorsese is an executive producer. Deep into production before Ebert's final bout with cancer, Life Itself is a triumphant portrait of an influential journalist and brave look at a man facing his ow...Read the entire review

I tend to be protective of my home state, North Carolina. Our state fares better than South Carolina and Georgia on film, but the Old North State still gets the roving redneck caricature treatment from time to time. Not so in The World Made Straight, a thoughtful Appalachian drama directed by UNC - Chapel Hill alumnus David Burris. Shot in Western North Carolina, the 1970s-set film is inspired by real Civil War tragedies that occurred in Madison County. Noah Wyle, Jeremy Irvine, Haley Joel Osment and Minka Kelly star alongside country singer Steve Earle, who unnerves as an ice-cold mountain drug kingpin. The beautiful scenery and authentic soundtrack accompany the strong performances, and a noir-ish undercurrent flows bene...Read the entire review

Actress Olivia Cooke revealed that the studio ordered some pretty drastic changes after seeing footage from Ouija, a film that uses the spirit board as inspiration and is exactly as bad as you think it is. Director Stiles White and company reshot 50 percent of the film, and, given the result, the original version must have been exceptionally awful. This is a film without a clearly defined villain or any vision whatsoever. I cannot believe Juliet Snowden and White's script had more than a basi...Read the entire review

I hoped Dracula Untold might be able to rekindle the spark of Universal's classic horror legacy. During the 1930s and 1940s, the studio released films like Dracula and Frankenstein, which are actually frightening. Their horror reboots have been hit or miss. Read the entire review

David Dobkin's The Judge is the kind of stuffed-to-the-brim drama that draws critical guff. You're not going to find that here. I'm a sucker for legal showdowns, father-son melodrama and fine acting, and this film fits the bill. Sure, it pulls on the heartstrings and the courtroom revelations are not exactly unexpected, but Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall are worthy adversaries and provide good performances. Downey plays a hotshot Chicago lawyer who returns home for his mother's funeral ...Read the entire review

What would you do to be famous? Starry Eyes takes the age-old barb that Hollywood is a soulless place full of terrible people and kicks it up a notch. Directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer craft an occult thriller that culminates in some grindhouse violence, but, more importantly, they create and sustain dread. An aspiring actress auditions for a legendary horror production company's next film, and is asked how far she will go to secure the role. With forces that prey on the young...Read the entire review

Although much of David Ayer's Fury takes place inside an M4 Sherman tank, the most compelling drama is outside its metal walls, in the smoldering German villages torched by a desperate Nazi army. Ayer assembles a strong cast - Brad Pitt, Logan Lerman, Shia LaBeouf, Michael Pena and Jon Bernthal - to man his tank, and Fury is a worthy return to the oft-explored drama of World War II. What carries Fury above its genre staples is the uneasy bond of the tank crew, which is less about...Read the entire review

Anyone taking Luc Besson's Lucy to task for its junk science is missing the point. OK, so humans really do use more than ten percent of the brain's capacity, and no magic pill is going to increase that power tenfold. Who cares? Such an urban legend embodies the "fiction" in this science fiction thriller, and Lucy takes an outrageous hypothesis, throws in a little actual substance and blows the roof off with stylish action and effects set amid a near-future world. I am doubly happy to ...Read the entire review

Liam Neeson is the guy to call when stuff needs doing. He again plays a detective-type; actually a retired NYPD officer working as an unlicensed private investigator. The character is from Lawrence Block's novel, and there are seventeen others about his Matthew Scudder in print. Scott Frank (The Lookout) directs from his own screenplay, which draws from his work on Read the entire review

My barely thirteen-year-old self had no idea what went on behind the scenes of Supernova when I bought a ticket at the box office in January 2000. Walter Hill (The Warriors) directed the infamous sci-fi dud, but a post-production power struggle at MGM saw Hill remove his name from the film. After a disastrous, effects-free test screening, MGM hired Jack Sholder (Read the entire review

The Michael Bay-produced Black Sails further positions Starz as a player in the premium cable showdown to produce original content. The pirate drama serves as a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island," and takes place in the 1715 West Indies as a group of rowdy pirates searches for Spanish treasure Urca de Lima. Most of the action takes place in the port of New Providence, and Black Sails explores pirate politics and loyalties. The slickly shot and produced show is cert...Read the entire review

I doubt many people asked for a sequel to apocalyptic actioner Legion, a poorly executed bore about angels sent by God to wipe out humanity. SyFy Network instead delivers a full season of cable-television drama in an obvious, likely necessary attempt to regain viewers who once flocked to the channel's critically acclaimed Battlestar GalacticaRead the entire review

Mainstream horror continued to flounder in 2014, but a number of promising independent features managed to fill the void with original chills and thrills. I really like the premise of Leigh Janiak's Honeymoon, and the uneasy, uncertain tension overshadows the somewhat disappointing ending. Newlyweds Bea (Rose Leslie) and Paul (Harry Treadaway) spend several days of wedded bliss at Bea's childhood vacation home before something sets Bea on edge. Honeymoon is a delicate, slowly burning t...Read the entire review

Pulpy Pennsylvania noir Banshee returns for a slightly more focused second season, though the rampant violence, gonzo characters and campy thrills continue. Season One introduced Lucas Hood (Antony Starr), a former convict who assumes the name and title of the incoming sheriff of Banshee, Pennsylvania, that was killed in a bar robbery. The first ten episodes throw a lot at the viewer, including scorned gangster Rabbit (Ben Cross), also the father of Hood's former partner and lover Carrie Hopewell (Ivana Milicevic). There...Read the entire review

Films like William Wyler's Ben-Hur transcend generations and create shared memories for casual and frequent moviegoers alike. This risky, expensive and elaborate Biblical epic is widely considered a classic, and the extravagant production design and strong performances remain impressive. The film sits atop Charlton Heston's resume, and his evolving, engrossing work as disgraced Jerusalem prince Judah Ben-Hur has priority seating in the annals of film history. Financially unstable MGM gambled ...Read the entire review

The last time director Antoine Fuqua and Denzel Washington worked together they created an exciting crime drama in Training Day. To echo corrupt L.A. detective Alonzo Harris, The Equalizer ain't got shit on Training Day. The film entertains with its pulpy violence and heavy focus on Washington, but the bland Russian mob villains seem better suited to a Read the entire review

Director Brad Anderson's (The Machinist, The Call) clumsily titled Stonehearst Asylum is based on Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether." Short stories tend to make narratively challenged feature films, and Anderson draws out the material to a very long 112 minutes. The total lack of buzz for this project is surpri...Read the entire review

The subterranean tunnels and crypts holding the remains of six million Parisians - known as the Catacombs of Paris - are a perfect setting for an imperfect horror film. As Above, So Below sends its young cast deep beneath the busy city streets in search of the Philosopher's Stone thought capable of turning base metals into gold and providing the elixir of life. Early scenes are quite effective, unbearably claustrophobic and filled with chilling imagery, but John Erick Dowdle's (Read the entire review

Who doesn't love a good disaster movie? Or a bad one for that matter? Into the Storm falls into the latter category, but there is still fun to be had with this lean, weather-disaster roller coaster. The previews for New Line's Twister wannabe were not great, so I opted to skip Into the Storm in theaters even though I really do love disaster flicks. I later watched the Cinema Snob's Read the entire review

British import The Devil's Business feels more like an episode of Hammer House of Horror than a theatrical film, but I am not complaining. This is an unexpectedly tense, slightly bizarre exercise in occult horror that just happens to use a pair of hitmen as its leads. The film is talky in its first half but runs a lean 69 minutes, complete with gonzo climax and Tarantino-esque exchanges between the leads. I am not sure how much replay value this one has, but anyone looking for a horror/British gangster mash-up should give it a spin.

For children of the 90s like me, Lois Lowry's "The Giver" is one of the most memorable books from our grade-school reading list. It is the rare novel that captured my young mind and one that I plowed through without complaint. The novel posed difficult questions about complex issues, and was certainly ripe for classroom discussion. One might successfully argue that Lowry's work spawned more recent Young Adult novels like "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent," which may be why this film adaptation feel...Read the entire review

I am a fan of Sylvester Stallone and the first two Expendables films. They are enjoyable, old school, no frills action movies with a heavy dose of nostalgia courtesy of the weary warrior cast. This third part ups the action and adds a number of new VHS heroes to the mix, but something is definitely missing. I am tempted to blame the PG-13 rating but that is too convenient. The problem lies in the story, which heavily focuses...Read the entire review

The filmmakers behind this 1988 remake of The Blob understand how ridiculous a giant gelatinous killer really is. Chuck Russell directs from a script co-written by Frank Darabont, and The Blob embraces its B-movie mentality like a long-lost lover returned. Thirty years of special effects maturation allows this remake to up the gory ante, and The Blob is delightfully over-the-top and disgusting. Kevin Dillon and Shawnee...Read the entire review

Sorry, Clint, you are not the right director for Jersey Boys. The Tony Award-winning stage musical about Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons is hilarious, toe-tapping fun, but something gets lost in translation in this film adaptation. The pieces are all here, including a strong cast and period-appropriate sets, but director Clint Eastwood cannot recreate the live-production spark. Jersey Boys is too stiff and too serious, and is not nearly as funny as it should be. The story has its d...Read the entire review

The 1988 Dutch/French thriller The Vanishing is intense and devastating; a harrowing portrait of evil. Director George Sluizer remade the film for American audiences in 1993, but this retelling is sanitized, overacted and dull. Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock star as a young couple whose lives are turned upside down by Jeff Bridges' suburban sociopath. Where the original film chilled with its fear-thy-neighbor nihilism, Read the entire review

The original Pumpkinhead impressed with its practical creature effects and atmospheric direction by Stan Winston. That film is more of the "Grim Fairy Tale" its poster promises than a bloody horror film. Perhaps that is why some fans consider this sequel the superior film. Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings is directed by low-budget horror maestro Jeff Burr (Leatherface: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre III, Stepfather II), and is a decidedly more gr...Read the entire review

Melissa McCarthy continues to make fungible comedies that are neither very good nor particularly offensive. She again plays a rebel with a bleeding heart in Tammy, a comedy not unlike McCarthy's Identity Thief and The Heat. The titular heroine runs her junker straight into a deer and gets sacked at work before walking in on her husband and another woman....Read the entire review

Perhaps Sylvester Stallone should recruit Christopher Walken if he makes another Expendables film. Fresh off an Academy Award win for The Deer Hunter, Walken played a mercenary for John Irvin in The Dogs of War. This meat-and-potatoes thriller sees Walken battling a ruthless African dictator and shady international business tycoons while his pers...Read the entire review

This show is having an identity crisis. The Eli Roth-produced Hemlock Grove cannot decide whether it wants to be an intense, adult-oriented horror show or a teen-baiting sci-fi romance. There are werewolves and monsters and death - Oh My! - but season one is a hot mess. Plot threads dangle and get snipped in the unsteady narrative, and I finished the season not entirely sure what I had seen. Famke Janssen fervently chews the scenery as Olivia, the matriarch of the powerful Godfrey f...Read the entire review

With Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz as the leads, I assumed there would be plenty of laughs in Jake Kasdan's comedy about a missing sex tape. I was wrong. This shockingly inept, consistently unfunny comedy drops the ball thanks to a dull screenplay and lack of focus. Three writers, including Segel, cannot get a single laugh in Sex Tape, and the film fails to capitalize on its R rating and promising premise. The film's 94 minutes felt like an eternity, and I expected more out of Diaz and Kasdan...Read the entire review

]]> A Million Ways to Die in the West (Blu-ray)Blu-rayhttp://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/read.php?ID=64963
Mon, 13 Oct 2014 21:46:15 PDTRent It

THE FILM:

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Seth MacFarlane swings hard and fast at an assault of incoming jokes, but the overall effect of A Million Ways to Die in the West is disappointing. The film's best gag is right there in the title, but that does not stop MacFarlane and company from beating that joke into the dusty ground. This rapid-fire approach to comedy will be familiar to fans of "Family Guy," "American Dad" and MacFarlane's full-length directorial debut, Ted. ...Read the entire review